Anthony Bailey

At the Essence Of Thought - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp...

Saturday from Amazon.com wish list - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

Deep Structure - http://mangled.me/blog...

Friday from Backtype - Comment - Like

"I agree the Evo website is poor. The talk he gave was more explicit about how measurement could usefully drive technical projects. It was very much “decide a metric you want to optimize, and tune your approach based on the feedback that gives you”, with some emphasis on the importance of having a metric you could quantify, and not being afraid to change what you measure as your project evolves. I think I agree that if you seek to crystallize a single essence for contemporary software development methodologies then “feedback” is a pretty good one. It’s an extreme simplification, but those are often useful. I note that feedback is a key part of control theory, which some students of agile have touched on before. Also your talk of core principles and values reminds me a little of Beck’s values -> principals -> practices hierarchy in XP Explained 2. “We know the impact of tweaking feedback loops” is a provocative statement – e.g. we know that feedback can lead to chaotic behavior, and to..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Continuity is a great little Flash game. It’s an original...

February 3 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Continuity is a great little Flash game. It’s an original hybrid of platformer and sliding block puzzle. Playing through it cost me an hour or so of sleep last night. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Chrome should adopt the Monkey - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

February 1 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"In the end, they started supporting GreaseMonkey a few months *after* launching Chrome extensions. http://blog.chromium.org/2010......" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

January 27 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

https://panopticlick.eff.org/: The EFF have been looking into how many bits of identifying information your browser provides to the sites you visit. They suspect: very many. They have an experiment called Panopticlick running to test this out for real. It’s fascinating. As an example, my own fingerprint was unique amongst the 50K they’d sampled so far. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Deep Structure - http://mangled.me/blog...

January 27 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"“if I could think of a snazzy name for it I would start a new software development methodology” “Evo” is quite a snazzy name for that kind of methodology. It’s an existing fringe approach championed by Tom Gilb that sounds somewhat like what you’re suggesting. He does a poor job promoting it – I’m only aware of Evo because he spoke (rather unpersuasively, at least partly because his presentation style was “I’m right and everyone else is wrong” antagonism) at the London XP Day 2005. http://www.gilb.com/Project... I might try on those trousers – thanks for the recommendation." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Uncle Bob: mocking mocking and testing outcomes

January 25 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Uncle Bob: mocking mocking and testing outcomes: Bob Martin wrote a great article on the overuse of mocking frameworks. His position is that whilst they are sometimes useful, they shouldn’t be the hammer with which you hit every nail - which is how they are often presented. He advocates hand-rolled mocks for the simple cases, and realizing that when this gets painful, you have a code smell re the coupling of the classes in the system under test. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Valve is up to something (I think) - http://z-studios.com/blog...

January 14 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"[old-fart]“Well actually”, Stefan Schwoon’s command-line tool demix (http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake...) did Quake1 demo mixing some years before the (very excellent) DEMentED2 did it for Quake2. Later on, mixing tracks recorded live was also a foundational feature of Fountainhead Entertainment’s Quake3 engine-based unsuccessful commercial Machinimation package.[/old-fart] I think mixing live action within a virtual world in a manner analogous to the way one mixes audio tracks is very powerful, especially when you can process the actions that you are mixing (space-transform, pitch-shift, change the “instrument”…) It also blurs the boundaries between performance and scripted machinima production, mixing the advantages of both, and possibly complicating some recent definition discussions (http://gtmachinimablog.lcc.gatech.edu/...)! I’d love to see live recording features in MovieStorm et al, although I guess they would have to reimplement even more of their game..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Recommended Listening: Software Carpentry (great concept, poor...

January 12 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Recommended Listening: Software Carpentry (great concept, poor name.) Greg Wilson talks about teaching condensed coding wisdom in this episode (53min) of Jon Udell’s Interviews With Innovators. He has for many years run a stand-alone course for university scientists summarizing important software concepts. Wilson is very pragmatic about both the value and the difficulties of having some kind of computational thinking taught throughout education. It is software carpentry as a limited subset of subset engineering - “About putting an extension on the house, rather than building the Channel Tunnel.” I hate this term; I greatly dislike the engineering metaphor, and carpentry also triggers the differently valuable software craft metaphor for me. Toward the end they discuss how outdated some of the key concepts in the course have already become (Wilson is hoping to work on a new version) given the rise of networks and agile. I was reminded of a recent conversation with an ex-colleague on... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Coders at Work - http://www.nobugs.org/blog...

January 10 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"Mostly asking this here rather than later at work because I will probably forget otherwise… Given your interest in language, have you read the similarly interview-based “Masterminds of Programming” (http://amzn.com/0596515170)? I was going to buy “Coders”, but got distracted by the existence of “Masterminds”, then wondered about buying that and trading lends with you." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

OnLive demo - could cloud really get game? Steve Perlman of...

December 29 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

OnLive demo - could cloud really get game? Steve Perlman of OnLive demos the cloud gaming service at Columbia NYC (48min video.) You plug a box into your TV, or a 1MB plug-in into your low-end PC or mobile device. You subscribe to the service (now in public beta) and rent/”buy” access to games. They lease the very high-end main servers the games run on. Eighty milliseconds from input to output at the player’s end is the magic number they enforce for acceptable interactivity. The servers are in data centers max one thousand kilometres from the player, and use UDP over (I think) circuit-switched connections from pretty much every provider, and optimize for latency elsewhere in the last mile too (e.g. their wireless controllers use a more aggressive protocols than standard console ones.) They compress on specialized hardware two ways: one on a frame-by-frame basis for the live stream that the player sees with various measures to tune for the connection, correct/conceal errors due to... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Review: Sweet Dreams (Pride, and Prejudice, and Zombies)

December 25 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

(hreview version 0.2) (Reviewed on 26 December 2009 by Anthony Bailey) Review is in the public domain product Sweet Dreams (Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness) by Daniel Dennett When I read the provocatively entitled Consciousness Explained fifteen years ago, I was very impressed by Dennett's "intentional stance" and advocacy of heterophenomenology - applying the standard scientific method to understanding the nature of the consciousness of some third-party, using the subject's own reports about their internal experience together with other evidence. The particular "multiple drafts" model of consciousness he proposed alongside was plausible but very sketchy. Dennett returns to the topic in Sweet Dreams, and again does a great job clearing the junk from this philosophical space. By his account, one has to fight surprisingly hard for common sense in the study of consciousness - people seem threatened by any model that doesn't make them sufficiently special, and... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

rashitproductnaming.apple.com

December 25 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

People keep speculating that Apple’s tablet will be called the iSlate. Seems a bad idea unless they’re really confident it won’t get delayed. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Introducing… Google Stooge - http://z-studios.com/blog...

December 14 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"Most amusing. This could be MRE2!" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations Into Veronica Mars (Smart Pop) - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp...

December 11 from Amazon.com wish list - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

Wave propagation

December 7 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

So yeah, Google Wave can be confusing, and certainly isn’t sufficiently dense in the average social/thinking circle to have been useful yet to, say, me. But I am impressed by its potential as a platform for prototyping new collaborative workflows. There are already some intriguing demos. I think this is fertile ground and wonder what else might blossom? See, I think this kind of application is very hard to develop from the ground up - but Wave gives you a framework for delta-based multi-party editing, a network of users running clients to embed the widget housing your great idea, and perhaps most importantly, all the other multimedia communication channels that you have to surround the key interaction with to make it work the best it can. (The old chestnut is that useful software grows features until it can read e-mail; I suspect contemporary group-think apps will prove to have IRC-envy.) - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Kata lists

December 1 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

This post contains a collection of thoughts about coding katas. A fair few are gripes - apologies for this negativity. I should start by saying I do love many aspects of the idiom: practice as play solving puzzles simple examples to unearth core ideas enjoying exploring multiple perspectives But (perhaps because with passion comes a desire for perfection) I do find a few aspects of the movement irksome: Most trivially, the “software as martial arts” thing is way overblown. I’m sure some analogies work, but many seem stretched. I detect lame Neo aspirations / geek Zen tourism. More substantively, the form is very often used in combination with B/TDD. But the katas necessarily have a small scope and hence more algorithm-centered than typical code; so solving the problems often involves an “aha!” moment after which the implementation is kind of obvious. Because of this the driving that you do tends to be along a path you can see the end of. You get value from the refactoring safety net... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Testing with less manual calculation

November 29 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

After seeing some solutions to this Ruby coding kata on generating ASCII representations of LCD calculator numbers I thought writing the test cases could be more pleasant. Because the whole idea is to have the machine deal with the tedious task of generating the fiddly and sizeable output, I really don't like the straightforward approach that means I have to supply lots of example outputs myself, by hand. I thought either of two alternative testing approaches might help: checking universal properties, or content regression. Universal coverage The first approach is that rather than give many specific examples of output, we find some generic conditions that all outputs should satisfy and then check these for many cases. For this to work well the inputs need to be simpler than the outputs, or easy to generate automatically. A good example from a previous job involved 3D vector geometry. We had code for distances and angles, and for various transformations. An intrinsic feature of this... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Model and motion capture for props

November 27 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Model and motion capture for props: Static props are considerably easier to create from scratch and script than are animations of a character model, so this won’t be as significant a time saver for machinima as character mo-cap is. Nevertheless, University of Cambridge present an interesting demo of capturing the mesh, skin and registered movement of real world objects through analyzing video from a single camera. [tag: machinima] - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Sometimes I don't GET it straight away

October 27 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

I recently encountered some wwweirdness I’m hoping someone smart can explain to me. So there’s a client computer A1, and a host C serving some web pages. If you ping or traceroute C from A1, the round trip time is consistently around 200ms. if you use a web browser on A to visit one of the pages that C hosts, then most of the time individual requests are served in a similar time. But for around 25% of requests, it takes orders of magnitude longer to serve the file: around 20s. The behavior doesn’t seem related to the URL being fetched: all are usually fast, sometimes very slow. Logs on C always show responses being turned around rapidly once requests are received - the delay is never visible within the server side. A1 is a machine in a domestic residence using a particular Net connection from a particular ISP. The problem is reproduced for another client machine A2 when it uses the same connection. C actually serves a variety of different domains, and the problem is reproduced across... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Consultancy => Affiliates => Shareware => Micro-startups => Robots => Corporate downfall

October 26 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Consultancy => Affiliates => Shareware => Micro-startups => Robots => Corporate downfall: Every so often Giles Bowkett posts a wonderfully zigzagging river of consciousness. Even if he was completely wrong they’d still be worthy poetry. Enjoy the ride. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Great imagery in the latest Dollhouse episode.

October 24 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Great imagery in the latest Dollhouse episode. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

iplayer-dl is a real TV gem

October 22 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Suppose you’re a (Ruby-biased) developer wanting to get at some BBC TV programme in a sane format. (The desktop iPlayer needed to play their default content is actually pretty shiny, but all DRM ends up hurting me eventually.) How happy would you be if you could just do % gem install iplayer-dl --source http://gemcutter.org % iplayer-dl http://bbc.co.uk/program... and end up with the nice unencumbered MP4 they publish for iPhone users? Pretty happy! Thanks, Paul Battley! - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Contemplating Unitasking - http://z-studios.com/blog...

October 7 from Backtype - Comment - Like

"unitasking++ “One result of that shift will be an increase in the time between releases of substance, and probably a decrease in the quantity of “quickies.”” Having *less time* does that. Unitasking should not. …unless you have external dependencies (”can’t work on project A today because am waiting for input from Mr X, do something on project B instead”.) Sometimes projects are completely independent (”I can save time/cost if I travel to the studio to do sound recording for project A and project B on the same day”) but tendency is to overestimate how much you can save that way. In fact, doing projects one at a time means you get the one you care about released *earlier* and the one you care about less *no later* than you would have done with parallel production. Suppose I have three projects each of which takes a month of my available time to do. If I work on them in parallel, I release all three after about three months. If I do them one at a time, I release first one after a month,..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Chromey yum

September 20 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

I have loved the Google Chrome browser from the moment I saw it. But my main machine at home runs Ubuntu, and the only OS Chrome is properly released on as yet is Windows. So I found myself bizarrely looking forward to needing to launch Windows to play a game or develop in MSVC, since I got the side thrill of launching something shiny when it was time to look webwards. But lately I’ve been trying the unofficial daily builds of Chromium for Ubuntu and they’re working great. Even the Flash support is getting better (and it isn’t a big deal for me because my only usecase for Flash is video, and save it all up for a single viewing session after midnight due to the unusual bandwidth charging policy of my broadband provider.) So for day-to-day browsing, Chromium is now my default choice. Yay! (Ironically the main time I’m not using it is when I have to swap often between multiple Google accounts - e.g. personal and Modern Mixers - when using their services; in Firefox, there’s an add-on for... - Anthony Bailey

I have loved the Google Chrome browser from the moment I saw it. But my main machine at home runs Ubuntu, and the only OS Chrome is properly released on as yet is Windows. So I found myself bizarrely looking forward to needing to launch Windows to play a game or develop in MSVC, since I got the side thrill of launching something shiny when it was time to look webwards. But lately I’ve been trying the unofficial daily builds of Chromium for Ubuntu and they’re working great. Even the Flash support is getting better (and it isn’t a big deal for me because my only usecase for Flash is video, and save it all up for a single viewing session after midnight due to the unusual bandwidth charging policy of my broadband provider.) So for day-to-day browsing, Chromium is now my default choice. Yay! (Ironically the main time I’m not using it is when I have to swap often between multiple Google accounts - e.g. personal and Modern Mixers - when using their services; in Firefox, there’s an add-on for... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: LiveJournal OPML fail - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

September 20 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"Livejournal syndicated feeds appear to be working again - the remnants of last week's feeds have rolled onto my Friends page in a fairly arbitrary order. But it's too late. I am now in love with Google Reader. I had looked at it when it first appeared, misliked its UseNet newsreader one-feed-at-a-time presentation, and not checked it since. But these days (as I'm sure the rest of the world already knows) it's this slick AJAXy jewel that is more than happy to give me the mixed feed stream view that I prefer. So, unfriend LJ. I'll leave my essay blog hosted there for now, but if they aren't my feed reader any more, I'm not going to visit the site very often going forward, and think I'll stop the annual "thankyou" I was giving them by having a paid account." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: LiveJournal OPML fail - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

September 15 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"LJ's still shafted, so I sighed, scripted and scraped. http://pastie.org/618092, archived at http://anthonybailey.net/pastes..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

LiveJournal OPML fail

September 14 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

LiveJournal appears not to have seen updates to any third-party feeds for around forty-eight hours. (It’s a known issue on their support page.) This impacts me, since I use LJ mainly as a feed reader - with very few exceptions, my “Friends” list is composed of syndicated feeds. So I haven’t seen updates from anyone I follow anywhere on the web for a couple of days. Of course, I know that relying on any one service is a bad idea, because Sometimes Stuff Breaks. But LJ is all fluffy and open, and so my plan for an outage like this was simply to export my subscriptions as OPML and read the feeds elsewhere. But, nuh-uh. The OPML that LJ exports points back to LJ’s own broken endpoints for the syndicated feeds, not to the feeds themselves. This is so dumb! Time to start scripting and scraping, I guess… - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

September 10 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

http://anagramtubemap.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/: Was pointed at this a week ago: reblogging it now because it continues to amuse me. Very fine anagram work. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

undef defun

September 3 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

When a major programming language conference comes to your home city, it seems churlish to ignore it. I have done precious little functional programming in the last fifteen years, and/but ICFP includes tutorials in the DEFUN development track, which ought to have met my hopes for abbreviated but intense introduction to new languages and concepts. So I attended two tutorials today - but they were kind of disappointing. Apart from me, the first tutorial (on contemporary OCaml) seemed to mostly attract sympathy attendance from a few people who could quite happily have given the talk themselves. Since they were the majority, it was not unreasonable that the session was mostly derailed from its advertised purpose into a more academic ML family chat, but I still felt somewhat cheated - although perhaps not of very much, since what did survive of the original content seemed pretty poorly organized. The afternoon session was substantially better, but I was still annoyed that Simon Thompson’s... - Anthony Bailey

When a major programming language conference comes to your home city, it seems churlish to ignore it. I have done precious little functional programming in the last fifteen years, and/but ICFP includes tutorials in the DEFUN development track, which ought to have met my hopes for abbreviated but intense introduction to new languages and concepts. So I attended two tutorials today - but they were kind of disappointing. Apart from me, the first tutorial (on contemporary OCaml) seemed to mostly attract sympathy attendance from a few people who could quite happily have given the talk themselves. Since they were the majority, it was not unreasonable that the session was mostly derailed from its advertised purpose into a more academic ML family chat, but I still felt somewhat cheated - although perhaps not of very much, since what did survive of the original content seemed pretty poorly organized. The afternoon session was substantially better, but I was still annoyed that Simon Thompson’s... - Anthony Bailey